In the NY Times, the New America Foundation's Peter Bergen unfolds a three-page defense of this thesis:
From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s [foreign policy] record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.
One complicating word in that passage is "the," just prior to "public," in the phrase "public perception." It contains the seed of the passage's own destruction. We must assume, given its context, that Bergen means to say "their" public perception (i.e., the left and right's) and not "the" public's perception, which is a vast difference within an entirely different meaning--the latter of which is never really established in Bergen's piece, hence there could be no "dramatic cognitive disconnect."
But here I perhaps quibble too much, which only suppresses my larger point. That being, one could also argue that Bergen misuses "public," in that he means to say "private"; for publicly, it seems to me, the left has indeed extolled Obama as a "warrior president," since the left is still trying to live down its rather unpleasant reputation for having carelessly misplaced China a few decades back, not to mention Korea and Vietnam, both North and South.
So, although I grasp Bergen's point, I simply disagree with it.
As for the right's "perception" of Mr. Obama's foreign policy, well, what can one say, as contaminated as it is with hatred, bile, distortion, and above all, a monstrous dishonesty. The political right, which remains indistinguishable from the neocon right, has removed itself as a legitimate voice in what is a profoundly legitimate debate.